SOURCE: Sackett, Samuel J. “The Application of Rogerian Theory to Literary Study.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 35, no. 4 (fall 1995): 140-57.

[In the following essay, Sackett argues that the focus of Rogerian theory on empathetic understanding of the other can be successfully applied to the study of literature.]

THE GENESIS OF LITERARY WORKS

Literary critics have long wrestled with the questions of why authors write at all and why a certain author wrote a certain work. The answers to these questions usually given by Freudian critics, not wholly in keeping with Freud's own attitudes, have tended to postulate that writers write because they feel tensions that they cannot resolve in the real world and hence need to resolve in fantasy. The work, then, can be seen as the fantasy in which the conflict is worked out, and its content is determined by the needs of its author. A theory of literary creation emerging from the writings of Rogers would be far different.

Rogers's paper “Toward a Theory of Creativity” (1961) can provide us with a basis from which we may view literary creation (pp. 347-359). Rogers defines the creative process as “the emergence in action of a novel relational product, growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on the one hand, and the materials, events, people, or circumstances of his life on the other” (p. 350). It is motivated, he says, by “man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities” (p. 351). It is, moreover, based on certain conditions that Rogers enumerates: (a) openness to the creator's own experience, (b) an internal locus of evaluation, and (c) the ability to toy with elements and concepts. Of these conditions, Rogers considers the last as the least significant, though without it the other two alone cannot lead to creativity.

Let us begin by seeing how the first condition applies to the literary artist—the poet, novelist, or dramatist. Rogers (1961) explains:

In a person who is open to experience each stimulus is freely relayed through the nervous system, without being distorted by any process of defensiveness. Whether the stimulus originates in the environment … or … in the viscera, … it is available to awareness. This means that instead of perceiving in predetermined categories … the individual is aware of this existential moment as it is, thus being alive to many experiences which fall outside the usual categories.

(p. 353)

Thus, for example, we may postulate that a poem arises in the mind of the poet, a novel in the mind of the novelist, or a play in the mind of the playwright as a deeply personal, experiential insight into the nature of reality. Such insights may be as various as a vivid perception of what snow really looks like, of what another person's motivations really are, or of what the value of an action really is. This element of Rogers's theory of creativity is applicable chiefly to the content of the literary work.

Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale,” therefore, may be hypothesized as resulting from the poet's hearing a birdsong and realizing that generations before his birth had heard the same song and that generations after his death would also hear it. Melville's Moby Dick, similarly, may have resulted from its author's musing back on his own whaling experiences and understanding how a man wounded in an encounter with a whale might come to the anthropomorphic belief that the damage had been done by the animal out of deliberate malevolence. Or Shakespeare's Macbeth was perhaps generated by its author's experience or observation suggesting to him that guilt has a way of betraying a perpetrator, sometimes in ways that are unexpected and dismaying. Although as Lesser (1957) points out, it would be reductive to maintain that such observations account for the whole of these works, their origins may have lain in a desire to communicate these perceptions to others (pp. 62-67).

It can readily be seen that, in contrast to the Freudian interpretation, a Rogerian literary theory would assume that literature arises from the health, not from the pathology, of the artist. At this point, one must confront the fact that many creative writers have had demonstrable pathologies. The depression of Mark Twain is well known, for instance, and recent studies of Robert Frost have emphasized the elements in his poems that show him to have been, as he himself wrote, “one acquainted with the night” (Latham, 1969). On the other hand, there is certainly no reason to doubt the essential psychological healthiness of some of the greatest writers in English, such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Fielding, and the vitality of their works suggests that healthy minds produced them. The apparent dilemma may be resolved by postulating that literary creativity is a healthy tendency, though the creations may express painful experiences. The expression of a painful experience may indeed be therapeutic for a writer, providing him or her with new insight into the experience.

In the absence of any experimental verification as to the validity of either Freud's or Rogers's view, one may at least say that the Rogerian conception of literary genesis is likely to be more easily accepted than the Freudian by those who value literature highly and who honor those who produce it. The Rogerian conception also seems on the face of it more congruent with everyday experience, as well as with clinical observation, because so much of the energy of the neurotic or psychotic goes into maintaining his defenses that he has little left for productive work; hence there is an essential implausibility in Freudian theory that Rogers, as well as his predecessor Rank (1932/1989, p. 27), avoid.

Freudian literary critics have focused almost entirely on the content of literary works, treating it as symbolic in the same fashion that Freud treated the content of dreams. The theory of Rogers (1961), on the other hand, gives an explanation also for literary form:

Perhaps the most fundamental condition of creativity is that the source or locus of evaluative judgment is internal. The value of his product is, for the creative person, established not by the praise or criticism of others, but by himself. … If to the person [the product] has the “feel” of being “me in action,” … then it is satisfying and creative, and no outside evaluation can change that fundamental fact.

(pp. 354-355)

The third element that Rogers postulates as essential to artistic creation is “the ability … to juggle elements into impossible juxtaposition, … [a] spontaneous toying and exploration” (p. 355).

From these conditions, we may draw a picture of the literary artist playing with his or her production, trying this word and that, this character and that, this episode and that, until finally it jells into a form that “feels right.” Then the creator maintains this form as appropriate in the face of criticism. This view emphasizes the originality of great writers as creators of new forms, or as the creators of new applications of old ones.

The three writers I have already cited, Keats, Melville, and Shakespeare, will serve us also here. The brief career of Keats may be seen as a continual search for forms that “felt right” to him. Rather than introject the values of the poetic school that still predominated in England when he began to write, a school that was devoted to imitations of Dryden and Pope, Keats began a restless rummaging through previous poets, seeking models with whom he could feel more comfortable. He “tried on” Milton at various times, with varying degrees of success in his longer poems but with much success in his sonnets; he tried on Spenser for “The Eve of St. Agnes”; and for his odes, despite the claims of the so-called “Neoclassical” poets that they used models from Latin literature, he found unused as models the stanzaic odes of Horace. Unfortunately, Keats died before he could go beyond the use of prior models and develop a fully personal and individual form. But his formalistic experiments were already so unlike the Popean poems of his immediate predecessors that his works, when noticed at all, received extremely hostile reviews. These reviews were so devastating, in fact, that his colleagues Shelley and Byron somewhat sentimentally laid his death to them rather than to the tuberculosis bacilli that infested Keats's lungs. Yet if Keats had been hurt by the unfavorable reviews, all he had to do to avoid the pain was conform his poetic output more acceptably to the standards of the influential reviewers of his day; instead of doing so, he maintained his idiosyncrasies in the face of them.

Melville, too, maintained his individual vision in the face of public misunderstanding and rejection. When Moby Dick was originally published, it was perceived by the reviewers as a falling off from his earlier, more straightforward adventure books, Typee and Omoo, with which he had at first established his reputation. From the formal standpoint, Melville began to use ambiguity as a structural device, forcing more attention and thought on the reader's part than had been necessary in his simpler books. Seeing Moby Dick scorned by contemporary reviewers, Melville had the option of returning to the kind of writing that had been successful for him in gaining popular acceptance; instead, however, he defiantly maintained the trend he was on, expanding the form of the novel to include more and more ambiguity and reducing the significance of story, through Pierre and The Confidence Man. The inability of contemporary readers to respond to this formal quality of his work was difficult for Melville to accept; after The Confidence Man (1857) he did not attempt to publish another novel for the rest of his life (he died in 1891). Yet although he did not publish it, he wrote one: Billy Budd, now perceived as a minor masterpiece, which was not put into print until 1924. His personal satisfaction with what he was doing in developing the novel's form was so intense that he put the labor that might have gone into another Typee into creating a work that during his lifetime served only for his own enjoyment.

Less is known about Shakespeare's life—so little, indeed, that it has become for some people a kind of academic game to try to decide who “really” wrote his plays. Yet there are indications that Shakespeare had some criticism to overcome from his contemporaries. Although the formal pattern had by no means been set in Shakespeare's England, and although his professional contemporaries such as Kyd and Marlowe were obviously liberated from it, on the level of the academic critics (such as Sir Philip Sidney), the theory of Aristotle, as interpreted by Castelvetro, and the practice of Seneca formed the approved model for tragedy. Shakespeare's early effort to conform to this model, Titus Andronicus, may be characterized as either dismal or absurd, but it can hardly be considered a success. It was only when Shakespeare had broken away from the Aristotelian-Senecan pattern and begun writing plays that in their freedom from dramatic convention were more like a 20th-century film script than like a Senecan tragedy that he produced his early successes—Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and the great series of tragedies that crowned his career—Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth.

Although Shakespeare was apparently always a great box-office draw, the denigrations of such contemporaries as Robert Greene indicate that the university-educated writers of his day considered the butcher's son from Stratford as an “upstart,” to use Greene's term; whereas part of their attitude may have stemmed from jealousy, part may also have resulted from Shakespeare's tendency to scrap the rules of academicians and present his story in the form he felt most appropriate. There may be significance in an anecdote recounted by his contemporary Ben Jonson. When it was reported to Jonson that Shakespeare boasted that he never blotted (revised) a line, Jonson, whose tragedies followed the strict Aristotelian pattern but were not as popular as Shakespeare's, exclaimed, “Would he had blotted a thousand” (Jonson, 1951, p. 156)! In recounting this incident, Jonson explained that he did not intend to express a desire that Shakespeare had not written at all, or even written less, but instead a desire that Shakespeare had not committed the many solecisms that in Jonson's view marred his work.

The examples of Keats, Melville, and Shakespeare, therefore, suggest that Rogerian theory may be fruitful for the study of literary genesis. Rogers's concept of “openness to experience” gives us a theory of creativity that, when applied to the literary artist, indicates that the artist's healthy condition of awareness leaves him or her receptive to insights about his or her own experience and about circumambient objects, people, and incidents, and that these insights serve to precipitate the content of the work. The literary work, then, is seen as a desire to communicate these insights to other people. The ideas of “internal locus of evaluation” and “ability to toy with elements and concepts” give us a theory that depicts the literary artist playing with the form of his or her communication until it provides the experience of satisfaction that it “feels right,” the artist then maintaining this personal and unique experience in the face of the opinions of others that the form “ought to be” something more conventional.

THE INTERPRETATION OF LITERATURE

As the Freudian critic approaches the problem of interpreting the meaning of a literary work, he or she tends to see the literary production as a network of symbols and interprets the work much as a psychoanalyst interprets a dream: a gun or a tree is a penis, a bowl or a cave is a vagina, and so forth. There is an important methodological inconsistency in this practice that has never been thoroughly explored, in that a dream is a production of the unconscious, whereas a literary work is in larger measure a production of the conscious mind.

Moreover, because the focus in Freudian literary interpretation is on the individual detail, there is some difficulty in moving from a welter of details to an interpretation that integrates all these details into a single, unified impression of the work as a whole. Frequently, indeed, Freudian critics must resort to the hypothesis that a work has many “levels,” and a symbol may mean one thing on one level and its opposite on another. In addition, as the many contradictions between Freudian critics show, the interpretation of symbols may be affected by the psychology of the interpreter.

The application of Rogerian theory to literary criticism would proceed far differently. It would conceive of the literary work as an artifact that contained, among its other elements, a system of values; the values would reveal themselves by a number of means (selection of emotion-charged words, sympathetic vs. unsympathetic characterization, treatment of incidents, etc.), but they would be apprehended by readers through their responses to the work, which would lead them empathically to an intuitive apprehension of the author's emotional attitudes.

Following Morris (1956), Rogers's (1969) view of operative value is that it may be defined as “the tendency of any living beings to show preference, in their actions, for one kind of object or objective rather than others” (p. 241). In the infant, Rogers says, the valuing process is organismic:

Each element, each moment of what he is experiencing is somehow weighed, and selected or rejected, depending on whether, at that moment, it tends to actualize the organism or not. … Another aspect of the infant's approach to value is that the source or locus of the evaluating process is clearly within himself. Unlike many of us, he knows what he likes and dislikes, and the origin of these value choices lies strictly within himself.

(pp. 242-243)

Here it will be enough simply to state that in Rogers's view the organismic source of value and its internal locus become distorted through conceptualizations introduced from the child's environment as he or she grows up. The important element in Rogers's thinking from the standpoint of interpreting literature is that operative value is a matter of what a person likes and dislikes; an individual values what he likes and disvalues what he dislikes.

A literary work may be regarded as a device by which the author reproduces in his readers the emotions he feels toward incidents, characters, and theme. The emotions generated may be regarded as either positive (“likes”) or negative (“dislikes”). Some of the emotions produced may indeed be irrelevant to the experience of the work, arising from the prior experience of the reader rather than from the reading at hand; other emotions will inhere in the work.

This could be experimentally verified by the process of inviting students to record their emotional responses to a literary work, much as I. A. Richards (1929) did with his students at Cambridge, but restricting the students, as Richards did not, to emotional responses. The results would fall into two categories: (a) those emotional responses that appeared in only one or, at most, a few papers, and (b) those that appeared in several, most, or all.

Those in the first category could be considered idiosyncratic, arising from what Richards called “irrelevant associations,” as well as from doctrinal prejudice, which Richards identified as the two causes of idiosyncratic readings. Those in the second category could be considered as inhering in the work itself and hence would be felt by readers who were empathic with the author.

This is not to recommend that so mechanical a procedure should replace other, more personal and more subjective, methods of literary criticism; or, indeed, that it should actually be applied at all. For one thing, reducing the interpretation of literature to an analysis of what Richards called “protocols” would eliminate the enjoyment of criticism and any scope for the exercise of the critic's personal flair. The experiment was proposed merely to point out that certain emotional responses do in fact inhere in the work itself.

And it would not be reductive of the role of literary critics to challenge readers to approach a work with the goal of using their own sensitivities to determine the extent to which emotional responses inherent in a work constitute a value system. One function of critics in a Rogerian approach to literary study would be to respond empathically to the work, to examine their own reactions carefully, to use those reactions to discover the values of the author (to the extent that they were revealed in the single work under consideration), and to present those values fairly from the author's point of view.

An example of how such a critic might function can best be provided through an examination of a short work. For this purpose, I have chosen Keats's sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.” The poem can be divided into two sections, according to the emotional responses it arouses; these two sections correspond to those in which it is arranged on the page typographically. During the first eight lines, the emotion is positive, but muted, so that it is hard to identify; it might be labeled as “interest,” the emotion that one would feel toward a traveler who had returned from strange lands and was telling the wonders that he saw. But then, in the last six lines, the emotional charge increases; it remains positive but the interest quickens into excitement, so that the reader no longer is the passive listener to the discoveries of others but shares empathically the emotions of the discoverer himself. Judging simply from the emotional responses of the reader, therefore, it would be reasonable to say that Keats valued both second- and firsthand experience, but that he valued firsthand experience more highly.

The cognitive content of the poem validates this reading, because the poem describes how, previous to reading the translation by George Chapman, Keats felt that his experience of Homer had been only secondhand; but when he read Chapman's translation, his experience was so direct that it was as if he were experiencing the Greek poet's “pure serene” firsthand. In this illustration, therefore, a critic, simply by examining his or her emotions, could arrive at the same conclusion that another critic might reach by the more conventional methods of interpreting the cognitive content of the poem.

This discussion leaves unanswered the question of the author's intention. From this standpoint, that question is irrelevant. Whatever appears in a literary work was put there by its author. Whether the author was conscious of his or her reasons for putting it there can rarely be determined, and, accordingly, that question is unanswerable as well as unimportant. An empathic understanding of the work will reach, interpret, and express the author's feelings, whether he or she was conscious of them or not.

Whereas this discussion of the role of critics in literature has focused solely on their potential use of a Rogerian approach to derive interpretations of the works, another possibility, which will not be explored fully here, can be mentioned. Basic to the type of criticism that has been suggested above is the critic's analysis of his or her own emotional response to the work. The reader of the criticism will have his or her own response, as well; and as he or she reads the critic's responses to the work they both have read, the reader will in a sense come into a confrontation with the critic. The reader may agree with the critic's emotional response, or disagree. In the latter event, the reader has gained from the reading of criticism some information about himself or herself that may lead to deeper insight. Consideration of this information might lead the reader to conclude either that he or she responded to the item in question more sensitively than the critic, or less sensitively. In the former instance, the reader may gain confidence in his or her ability to rely on his or her own organismic experiences; in the latter, the very recognition that sensitivity is lacking may aid in the development of it.

The example of Keats's sonnet supports the contention that the reader's affective responses to a literary work can lead to a comprehension of its value system and hence the contention that a Rogerian approach to literary analysis will yield an interpretation that will meet criteria of internal consistency, completeness, and centerdness in the work itself.

THE ANALYSIS OF CHARACTER

The Freudian approach to character analysis has led principally to psychodiagnosis. Most famous among such studies is probably Ernest Jones's (1949/1976) theory that Hamlet's tragic flaw is an Oedipus complex. A Rogerian approach to character analysis would be substantially different, being in one way simpler and in another more complicated.

Whereas there are abundant expressions throughout Rogers's work of his ideas in general (e.g., 1961), the paper in which he most thoroughly explores the etiology of behavior in an individual is “Ellen West—and Loneliness” (1980, chap. 8). In his examination of this case, Rogers finds the source of West's problem in an incongruence between the experiencing of her own autonomous organism and those feelings that she feels obligated to have because of pressure from her family. For example, her own experiencing tells her that she is in love; but her family tells her that she is mistaken. She comes, therefore, to distrust her own experiencing, to believe that it is an untrustworthy guide, and, consequently, to believe that she is an inadequate person who is seriously unequipped to reach her own decisions about life's problems. In the end, Ellen West committed suicide.

Rogerian character analysis would be simpler than Freudian because ultimately for Rogers, all characterological problems spring from a single source: incongruence between the internally experienced reactions of the person and the reactions he or she considers him- or herself obligated to have because of pressures from the environment, usually parents or other significant adults, while he or she is a child; and usually the incongruence arises because the individual must, or believes he or she must, modify his or her reactions to receive love from these adults.

But Rogerian character analysis would also be more complicated than Freudian because the number of ways in which this fundamental incongruence can manifest itself is not, for Rogers, limited to the number of psychoses, neuroses, and personality disorders in the psychiatric system; it is, rather, infinite. The number of ways in which a person's behavior may manifest the incongruences in his or her values is greater than the number of persons, because the same person may have more than one incongruence and may manifest each of them in more than one way.

Because a famous Freudian analysis of Hamlet has already been mentioned, it would be interesting to contrast that with what a Rogerian analysis of the same character would reveal. Rather than an Oedipus complex, a Rogerian critic would seek an incongruence; and he would not need to seek far. One of the most striking things about Hamlet is the incongruence between the prince we see in action—charming, capable of deep affection, courageous, able to seize control of the most difficult situations and master them—and the prince who is revealed to us in the famous soliloquies (“Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”). Hamlet has an extremely low self-image, indeed has so little sense of his own worth that he meditates suicide (“To be, or not to be”); yet this low opinion of himself seems totally unwarranted.

As the play proceeds, we observe that much of Hamlet's planning is counterproductive: he feigns insanity (an “antic disposition”) to become inconspicuous and succeeds only in calling attention to himself; he produces a play mimicking the real murder of his father by Claudius to verify what he already knows and succeeds only in putting Claudius on guard against him; and so on. One explanation for such behavior is that he is afraid of success; he has an image of himself as a failure, and so he mismanages his revenge to fulfill his own image of himself.

This leads us to wonder whether the significant adults in Hamlet's life have created this low self-image. And the scenes between Hamlet and his father's spirit support that conjecture. Hamlet already knows from his “prophetic soul”—Shakespeare's name for what Rogers calls the autonomous organism—that Claudius has killed his father; but he has been so accustomed to using inactivity as a way of gaining his busy father's attention that he takes no action until finally the elder Hamlet must literally return from the grave to tell the prince what he knows already. Ineptitude is another way in which the prince has been able to get King Hamlet to notice him; he had learned bumbling as a habitual behavior because bumbling always brought Daddy to straighten things out, and so he bumbles his vengeance until finally the ghost must make his second appearance to bring Hamlet back to the accomplishment of his “almost blunted purpose.”

Like Ellen West, Hamlet is afraid to rely on his own internal experiencing, because he feels obligated to have the low opinion of himself that he has learned from his father. This is rather different from saying, as Ernest Jones does, that Hamlet is a rival of his father for Gertrude's affection; the point is rather that Hamlet is an unsuccessful suitor for his father's attention.

This example demonstrates that Rogerian psychology provides the literary critic with a tool for analysis of character: the concept of incongruence between the experiences of the individual's autonomous organism and the values that the individual accepts because he must, or feels he must, to gain the love of significant adults in his childhood environment. Such analysis may be applied not only to characters in dramatic or narrative works but also to the authors who reveal themselves in lyric poems, in which they function as characters much as the speakers of speeches in plays, or dramatic monologues, do.

THE VALUE THEORY OF LITERATURE

One of the basic issues that has concerned literary critics and aestheticians since the time of Aristotle is the purpose or function of literature. Many proposals have been made, and many literary movements have crystallized around these proposals, but no widespread agreement has been reached. The substantial discussion of this matter in Wellek and Warren (1956) indicates both the importance of the problem and the difficulty of its solution. It would be too much to expect that an application of Rogerian psychology to literature would resolve the question of what value it has as a human activity where so many previous attempts have failed. But that Rogerian psychology provides an answer to the question that has not previously been suggested indicates at least that it can offer literary study a positive contribution to the continuing debate, a contribution that will stimulate consideration of new possibilities.

In Rogers's system, what he calls “the experiencing of feeling” is extremely important. “In our daily lives,” he writes, “there are a thousand and one reasons for not letting ourselves experience our attitudes fully, reasons from our past and from the present, reasons that reside within the social situation” (Rogers, 1961, p. 111). The suppression of this experiencing becomes one of the reasons why a therapeutic relationship becomes necessary; its expression therefore becomes an important goal of such a relationship. “When a person has, throughout therapy, experienced in this fashion all the emotions which organismically arise in him, and has experienced them in [a] knowing and open manner, then he has experienced himself, in all the richness that exists within himself” (p. 113).

Earlier I stated that one way of looking at a work of literature is that it is a device for creating emotional responses in a reader. As the reader proceeds through the work, he or she is pulled now into apprehension, now into indignation, now into contempt, now into affection—if one reads long enough, indeed, all the emotions that are capable of organismically arising in a reader will be stimulated into existence. To read a work of literature, then, is in Rogers's sense of the word a “facilitative” experience, because it increases the degree of access that the reader has to his or her organismic experience.

Such a concept of literature may be tested by examining some specific works of literature. It will be convenient to use Herman Melville's requiem “Shiloh: A Requiem” (April 1862) as an illustration of how reading a poem might hypothetically function as a facilitative experience for readers. The text is as follows:

Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
The forest-field of Shiloh—
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
Around the church of Shiloh—
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there—
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.

The poem begins with an image of swallows flying over a field, an image that gives the reader a peaceful emotion. One by one Melville introduces details that disrupt the peacefulness because of their associations: first the name Shiloh itself, celebrated as the name of a Civil War battlefield; then the negative emotions associated with “parched” (water deprivation) and “pain” (wounds); then the ironic detail (and from this standpoint irony can be identified as an exception) that the soldiers were fighting around a church on Sunday; then the sadness associated with the groans and prayers of the “dying foemen.” This movement is suddenly interrupted by surprise as Melville calls them “friends at eve.” Why were the foemen friends at evening? He answers that question in the following line: In death or even only in agony, they were no longer concerned about their personal competition for fame or about the success or failure of their contending governments. And in the following line (“What like a bullet can undeceive!”), his use of the word “undeceive” indicates that he believes that concern with fame and country is a deception, indicating false values. The poem ends with a return to the image of the swallows, restoring the peace of the opening but this time with a tinge of sadness for the dead who died as a result of being deceived about what was important.

Reading the poem empathically in this way results in a conclusion that the cognitive content validates: Melville values nature, as the positive emotions associated with the swallows demonstrate, and he disvalues war, as the negative emotions associated with his description of the wounded and dying men demonstrate equally well. But there is also another dimension of the poem revealed by this analysis of the affective content. The positive emotions associated with nature and the negative ones associated with warfare work against each other to provide an implication that war is unnatural, a violation of nature.

Moreover, the analysis shows a sudden interruption of the emotional flow of the poem, occasioned by the surprise generated by the expression “friends at eve.” This surprise arouses curiosity, which Melville proceeds to satisfy in purely cognitive terms through the line “Fame or country least their care,” which is explanatory rather than evocative—a line that has very nearly no affective content at all. It is puzzling to determine why Melville felt the need for a sudden shift from affect to cognition, because he had already made his point adequately by working on the emotions of his reader. It is tempting to conjecture that he distrusted the ability of the emotions to communicate the point he wanted to make about war and felt the need to turn to a relatively plain statement, editorializing by presenting an abstract idea to the reader's mind rather than relying wholly on an appeal to the reader's emotion. And it is hard not to feel that this intrusion of the abstract into the poem is not, from the standpoint we have been taking, a blemish.

The contrast between the emotions at the beginning and ending of the poem might well be facilitative. The experience of psychotherapists will endorse the assertion that there are people who have no trouble at all in recognizing single, uncomplicated emotions but who do have trouble when their emotions are mingled or mixed. Such persons reading “Shiloh” would have the experience of feeling peacefulness twice within a very few lines, once as a simple emotion and then once mixed with sadness. They would therefore be led to experience their emotions in a more knowing manner.

Rogers (1961) speaks of “the safety and freedom of the therapeutic relationship,” which allows emotions to be experienced fully (p. 111). The literary relationship between the reader and the work allows the reader as much safety and freedom as the therapeutic relationship between the client and the therapist. In the privacy of his own chair, the reader is free to feel whatever emotions he or she may and is safe from any adverse consequences.

No single work will suddenly open a reader to his or her own experience; some people may spend a lifetime reading without being fully opened to their own experiences. But the general tendency of the literary relationship is in the direction of providing readers with the same kind of situation as the therapeutic relationship—a safe environment where they are free to feel whatever they feel and accordingly are more open to their own attitudes and more aware of what those attitudes are.

No claim is here made that all readers will be facilitated by literature in the same way. The purpose of this discussion is only to demonstrate that literature has the potentiality of functioning facilitative and thus to suggest that one value of literature is that the reader will be helped to become more aware of his or her organismic emotions through having these emotions aroused in literary situations and hence made accessible.

This contribution to the continuing discussion among literary critics and aestheticians as to the value of literature is yet another way in which Rogerian psychology can be fruitful for literary study.

CONCLUSION

Freudian psychology has provided literary study with enough in the way of useful applications that it has won its right to be considered a fruitful theory, one which yields insights beyond the limits of the discipline in which it was originally developed. Rogerian psychology also passes this test of fruitfulness, because it can be used to provide literary study with a theory of literary genesis, a procedure for literary interpretation, a conceptual framework for the analysis of characters, and an explanation of why literature has value.

It is, indeed, superior to Freudian psychology in this regard. The theory of literary genesis used by Freudian critics suggests that creativity is pathological, which is difficult to accept because the amount of libido that is cathected by pathological conditions would leave the artist little energy for his work; Rogers more plausibly sees creativity as a sign of healthy self-fulfillment and in addition provides an explanation for the importance of literary form that is generally omitted from consideration by Freudian critics.

Whereas Freudian interpretations of works tend to seek symbols and to interpret them as a psychoanalyst would interpret dreams, Rogerian interpretation would focus on the emotions aroused by the work and use those emotions to analyze the value system of the work—a simpler procedure and one that would lead a critic to concentrate on the total effect of the work rather than on the details.

Rogerian character analysis would be at the outset simpler than Freudian, because it would begin by seeking an incongruence in the character; but then in its outcome, it would be richer, because it would not be limited by the categories of psychodiagnosis but could deal with the infinite variety of humanity.

And, finally, Rogerian psychology suggests a reason why literature is valuable to a reader, whereas most Freudian critics have been reluctant even to propose solutions to this problem. One of the more persuasive Freudian critics, it is true, argues that the value of literature is that it relieves anxiety (Lesser, 1957); but compared to this, the value that one finds proposed by Rogers, that literature functions facilitatively for the reader, is much broader.

References

Jones, E. (1976). Hamlet and Oedipus. New York: Norton. (Original work published 1949)

Jonson, B. (1951). Ben Jonson. In H. C. White, R. C. Wallerstein, & R. Quintana (Eds.), 17th-century verse and prose (pp. 154-156). New York: MacMillan.

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